


This Thing That is Happening to You

by scioscribe



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Coming Out, M/M, Roofies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 12:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it comes to telling Michael about his relationship with Tony, Gob has nothing but roofies and time.  (And anxiety.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Thing That is Happening to You

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a short list of Gob headcanons on Tumblr, one of which was that Gob would keep coming out to Michael and then giving him Forget-Me-Nows until he'd gotten it right. Like all things _Arrested Development_ , it was a concept that was only funny until I thought about it a little longer, whereupon it became dark and kind of depressing. Also, canon shout-outs and references throughout.

The first time Gob comes out to Michael, he does it accidentally.

“Well,” he says, looking down at Michael’s unconscious body and Forget-Me-Now-induced slobber-wet chin, “that was a freebie.”

*

The second time Gob comes out to Michael, it’s in the middle of a conversation about how mustard and powdered parmesan is going to take off any day now as the snack of the millennium.

“We’re not very far into the millennium,” Michael says. “Do you know what millennium means?”

“Of course I do, Michael.” Gob is confident that a millennium is a long stretch of time, something bent against the earth like a rubber band, getting longer every second as it is pulled out into the vacuum of space. “It comes in cycles, like the moon.”

Michael gives him a patented Michael look, the look he’s been giving him since third-grade science fair, like Gob has screwed up something but Michael’s going to be nice and not say. It makes Gob taste candy vines in the back of his throat. He wants to impress Michael, and there is only one thing about him that’s impressive, so he says, “By the way—and speaking of bi—I’m dating Tony Wonder.”

Michael doesn’t say, “I _knew_ it,” this time, even though he arguably does know it. Gob associates Forget-Me-Nows with airbrushing, lately, more than he associates them with outright amnesia. Apparently with Michael, he timed it better, because Michael just blinks at him, long and slow, and says, “I assume you’re joking?”

Tony is his own legs and Gob is his own incision, straight down the center, sawn in half.

*

The third time Gob comes out to Michael, he drinks heavily before, during, and after. Michael does, too. They squeeze lime slices into their mouths and lick salt off their hands and, swaying from side to side, talk about how, if they’d been girls, they would have had their shirts off every Spring Break for the cameras.

“Do you still like breasts, anyway?” Michael says. _Breasts_ , as only Michael would put it, unzips and spills out its vowels, becomes some long and entangled buzzing sound that reminds Gob his bees need tending.

Gob still likes women, but he has never liked anyone the way he likes Tony, from the way he gets hoarse after they’ve talked for hours to the way Tony’s hands push against his hips and leave purple glitter on his skin like a Pink Floyd constellation. He says, harshly, “Just because I’m fucking him doesn’t mean I’m blind,” and Michael sort of nods.

Their conversation is a game of Twister with a slippery mat. Gob hates himself for too many reasons to count.

“But why did you take one too?” Tony will ask him later. They will be in bed and Tony will be running a rainbow-stamped coin over his fingers and Gob won’t be able to take his eyes off it. He will give Tony a sloppy blowjob—his muscles still feeling unhooked and loose from the Forget-Me-Now—to make up for not answering, because he will remember, although Michael, of course, won’t.

*

The fourth time Gob comes out to Michael, he says, “So you know how we always thought Tobias was gay? Turns out it’s genetic,” and then drugs Michael just so he won’t have to listen to the rest of his explanation about the difference between brothers and brothers-in-law. Gob knows the difference, anyway: he isn’t at all worried about coming out to Tobias.

*

The fifth time Gob comes out to Michael, Michael purses his lips for a second and says, “This whole thing feels a little familiar.”

Gob looks steadily over Michael’s shoulder. They’re on the beach, eating frozen bananas from the replacement stand, and Gob has insisted on lots of nuts and now regrets it because of the unintentional double entendre. “I may have told you before. Once or twice.”

“You _roofied_ me,” Michael says. “I can’t believe this. You are such an unbelievable—”

“Homo,” Gob says, sighing, looking down at all the additional nuts.

“ _Asshole_ ,” Michael finishes.

“ _I’m_ the asshole? You’re the one making me coming out of the closet _all about you_ and your precious little, you know—” Gob flaps his hands around and thinks of chicken. “Brain, or whatever. And Forget-Me-Nows don’t hurt your memory, Michael, I take them all the time.”

“Should this be turning me on?” Tony will say later, when Gob collapses into bed with a black eye and two bitten fingers from shoving his hand halfway down Michael’s throat, and Gob won’t too tired to smirk. Tony will kiss him lightly on the eyebrow just above the bruise. “Although, Gobie, hey. You know you’re going to have to do it for real one of these days, right?” But he will know Gob well enough— _same_ —to add, “Unless we run away and learn how to train tigers.”

“You’d look good in satin,” Gob will say, and it won’t be a promise and it won’t be an apology, but some tangle of both.

*

The sixth, seventh, and eighth times Gob comes out to Michael go fine. Michael seems vaguely unsurprised. He pats Gob repeatedly on the side of his arm and says that Gob is his big brother and Michael will be there for him no matter what. He doesn’t say love, any of those times, and Gob tells himself that that isn’t why he doesn’t just take them for what they are: probably the best he’s ever going to get.

“This is getting embarrassing,” Tony will say, and he will turn over in bed, his back a wall.

Gob will look for a long time at the shape of him in the dark and around two in the morning, he will open his mouth to say he’s sorry and come up with, “If I wanted to feel like shit, I’d—” and Tony will roll over suddenly and press his mouth to Gob’s. His face will be hot and sort of damp and Gob will reach down to fumble with silk drawstrings and finally give up, just pushing Tony’s pajama pants down with an urgency that he won’t have felt since Cinco, when everything in him was a drumbeat of _don’t think about it, don’t think about it._

He’ll say, “I love you. It isn’t because I don’t love you.”

“All right,” Tony will say. “Okay,” but his body will still be stiff, all night long, and the next night he won’t sleep over and Gob will have trouble adjusting to the way his bed is half-empty. He will know that optimism is bullshit, because nothing about any of this feels half-full.

*

“You are causing me a lot of problems,” Gob says, the ninth time he comes out to Michael. They’re sitting around his living room. His voice is weird—he sounds like Michael, actually, convinced that everything is falling apart.

He sounds like Michael when Michael had to sit in a hard-shelled plastic chair in Tracey’s hospital room: he sounds like someone who worries about bedsores and feeding tubes while his carefree older brother distracts his son with card-tricks. The corners of Gob’s first professional deck are still bent from George-Michael’s teeth. Gob doesn’t know what he would do if anything ever happened to Tony, but now he is the thing happening to Tony, just like Michael is happening to him and Tracey happened to Michael: love, he decides, is a cluster-fuck.

He puts his head in his hands. “You have to help me,” he says. “I’m ruining the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Are you _crying_?”

“I have _feelings_ , Michael,” he says.

“I know, hey— _hey_ , buddy. I know that.”

“I have feelings for Tony Wonder,” Gob says. It’s the ninth time he’s said it and the only time he’s said it when he’s been out of Forget-Me-Nows. “We’re dating.”

“Oh,” Michael says, and then: “Okay,” and the moment between those two words is the moment when Gob goes from being not okay to being, really, fine. He just needed time.

Michael adds diplomatically, “He seems like he’s been very successful,” and two weeks later, Gob will use Michael’s office computer and find an extensive search history about Tony Wonder. He will realize Michael wants to know if Tony is good enough for him. Mostly because one of the search queries will be: _Tony Wonder good enough date brother_.

He will latch onto Michael when he gets back, hugging Michael hard against him, and Michael will say, “I really have to change my password.”

Michael’s password is _Tracey_.

Gob will understand why: Tony is the key to unlocking him, too.

*

“You’re the key to unlocking me,” he says, not wanting to throw away a good line, when he shows up at Tony’s door. He pulls a bouquet out of his sleeve. It’s the first illusion he’s done since his days in the entourage and he’s rusty enough to leave a few rose petals scattered on Tony’s porch.

“You are—” and having exhausted his store of already-prepared metaphors, he works on the fly. “You are like all the times I ever thought I was happy, but you’re real. I blew up a yacht once to sink it and you’re like—when I did that, that’s you, like I finally got something right and I’m going to go after it, no matter what I have to sink, okay? I mean, not Michael, because he’s fine with it as long as we don’t ever tell him about the Forget-Me-Nows, but if you come with me right now, we’ll have sex in my mother’s apartment and wait for her to walk in. However you want to do it.”

Tony looks at the flowers. “Do you mean like—however I want you to come out to your parents, or however I want to have sex?”

Gob doesn’t remember how he phrased it and figures Michael might have a point about all the Forget-Me-Nows. “Both?”

“You’re kind of weird about your family,” Tony says. “Why don’t we have sex here and then go out to dinner with them and tell them then?”

“Yeah, thank you, because I was really hoping we wouldn’t do it at my mom’s. Her sheets always smell like menthol.”

“I love you,” Tony says, “even though I’m a normal person who managed to tell my family weeks ago and you somehow need a Mexican pharmacy to tell _one person_ in yours.” He shakes his head and Gob realizes that he remembers one thing, however many hits his mind has taken over the years of spiraling cycles of shame: Tony looks the exact same way he did the night of the wrong Little Ballroom. He looks like he’s going to step aside and, against his better judgment, tell Gob he can come inside.

“You love me,” Gob says. “ _Me_.” He has always been loved, when he’s been loved, against someone’s better judgment: he has no problem being that person for Tony.

“Don’t push it. The only reason you’re getting laid is I _might_ have sent some mafia kid in magic camp to my dad’s house to drug him after we Skyped and I told him the first time. The first seven times. I owe that kid a shit-ton of doves. And you’re, you know.” Tony waves his hand and somehow slips the roses into a vase behind his back. Gob plays it cool. “The best thing that ever happened to me. Or whatever.”

Gob feels like his smile is taking up too much of his face. “Oh,” he says, not cool at all. “Yeah. Same,” and he kisses Tony against the front wall of his house and doesn’t care who sees.


End file.
